Abstract
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Highlights
This essay focuses on a work that belongs to a subset of graphic novels, namely wordless graphic novels
As comics scholars have been claiming over the last two decades, understanding graphic and visual solutions as medium-specific tools to represent narrative time and focalization could possibly help narratology move ‘beyond the categories [...] that are solely based on literary examples’ (Mikkonen, 2008: 319)
Theories born out of literary narratology cannot but reveal a certain narrowness of scope when applied to the study of graphic narratives, mainly due to the different nature of their objects of study
Summary
This essay focuses on a work that belongs to a subset of graphic novels, namely wordless graphic novels. Among the contemporary wordless graphic novels in the medium of comics, Australian artist and award-winning filmmaker Shaun Tan’s 2006 work The Arrival stands out as direct and readable This is a remarkable achievement if one considers that Tan’s visual style has been described as ‘decidedly antinaturalistic’ (Groß 2013: 205) and that he creates a vaguely steampunk world crammed with strange pets, unintelligible languages, and weird objects, whose behavior appears as much unpredictable to the protagonist as to the book’s viewers. This double-page spread shows viewers that twelve months have elapsed in the narrative by means of a visual synecdoche, which stands for the changing of the seasons. The gray color palette of the page, which contrasts with the predominantly sepia-toned palette of most of the book’s pages, functions as an additional clue which
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